Here's the latest news from the race to replace Rahm Emanuel in the 5th Congressional District.

Crain's Greg Hinz reported last night that Forest Claypool plans to endorse his fellow Cook County commissioner Mike Quigley today. Two weeks ago, Quigley conducted a poll that showed Claypool with much higher name ID and favorability numbers in the district than any of the candidates in the race.

This morning, labor lawyer Tom Geogheganwill announce the preliminary settlement of the class-action lawsuit he filed against Chicago's Advocate Health Care over the hospital’s
unfair billing practices of the uninsured:

"They were charging uninsured or under-insured people the full
sticker price instead of the lower rates that people with insurance
pay," Geoghegan said. For example, a birth that would have cost $1,800
for a Blue Cross patient would have cost $5,000 for an uninsured
patient, Geoghegan said.

Under the settlement, someone living at twice the poverty line or less would be charged nothing, he said.

Sara Feigenholtz sent out a press release yesterday commending Congress on the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which is now headed to President Obama's desk:

“As someone who helped lead the fight for Illinois’ own Equal Pay for Equal Work law, I am thrilled that the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act may be the first bill signed into law by President Obama,” Feigenholtz said. “The Ledbetter Act will help bring an end to an era of wage discrimination and provide working women with greater equity in the workplace.”

Fox Chicago's Dane Placko ran another report last night on the message testing poll recently conducted by the Feigenholtz campaign. In an interview with Placko, Feigenholtz said she wouldn't comment on "campaign strategy." Quigley said that Feigenholtz had "tipp[ed] her hand" with the poll and shown she was "going to be negative and nasty." But it's important to remember that, while some of the claims about her opponents in the poll were over-the-top, negative message testing is extremely common. The true test will be whether Feigenholtz actually goes public with any of those messages.

Meanwhile, John Fritchey told Placko that he considered it a "push poll." This is pretty disingenuous, as push polls try to sway an election by blanketing a district with calls. As a reader pointed out to us last summer, "If a push is happening, you don't get a few complaints, you get thousands." There's no indication that thousands of voters received this particular survey.

Finally, challenges were filed against the petitions submitted by the following Democratic candidates: Charlie Wheelan, Roger Thompson, Pete Dagher, and Carlos Monteagudo. The
Cook County Officers Electoral Board will consider these objections at a Friday morning hearing. In a press release, Democratic candidate Jan Donatelli decried the challenges against Dagher, Thompson, and Wheelan, calling it "old-style Chicago politics as usual."